The Wineparty
(Manfred Klimek) There are crises that do not merely mark an end, but the beginning of something else. The cliché that every crisis is also an opportunity is still nonsense – just like the agonisingly prescribed positive thinking. But what are the opportunities in the current wine crisis, actually? Sales are falling, entire harvests remain unharvested, the Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek, editorial department) The Saar is a place in between. Too large to be tranquil, too rugged to market itself, too beautiful to be forgotten. A landscape that interrupts: in the south, its vineyards end at the old steelworks of Völklingen, rusty, defiant, like an industrial epilogue to nature. In the north, it runs Read the full article…
(Editorial department) The 2025 German wine harvest is small. Very small. At 7.3 million hectolitres, it is at its lowest level for 15 years. The German Wine Institute states the figures soberly, almost in passing – and yet this report contains more of the future than the industry may perhaps want to acknowledge. For what is hinted at here is not a crisis. Read the full article…
German text attached below (Editorial Department, BBC) The Catholic Church and Its Holy Wine: Blessing, Authority and History Throughout its long history – often dark and powerful – the Catholic Church not only spread the Gospel to distant countries, but also wine. The “divine nectar of grapes,” as the Bible says, was Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek, WELT am SONNTAG, photo: Moueix) It seems like a provocation, and it is one: Château Lafleur, a small and world-famous wine estate in the equally small and world-famous region of Pomerol – where some of the world’s most prominent wine estates reside – is leaving the prestigious area in terms of wine law. The 2025 drought has an already almost cruel Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) It has taken a while, but the so-called “New Right” now also seems to have understood that the real culture war of our time is decided not at the ballot box, but also at the dining table, in the wine shop and during the evening wind-down – between those who drink wine and those who no longer do. In the Read the full article…
(Jürgen Howald / Manfred Klimek, Editorial team) It is no longer a secret: Germany’s best sparkling wines no longer need to be compared with Champagne. They now confidently taste of their origins, of slate and other terroir, of people who know that time and dosage (if there is still any) are more than bubbles. Anyone who today finds Griesel, Read the full article…
Actually, Martin Kerres, originally and somehow still a doctor, only wanted to have a house in Tuscany. Sun, olive trees, a small refuge in the Maremma with a distant view, where the wind drives the butterflies up the slope. But things turned out differently. Today, his Valdonica winery in Sassofortino produces almost 35,000 bottles a year. Recently, alongside the barrels and stainless-steel tanks in the cellar, there has also been an amphora (the Italians call it an “Anfora”), almost the height of a man, from which one of the region’s most exciting new wines comes.
(Manfred Klimek, Editorial team) It is not a thaw yet, but perhaps the first quiet creaking in the ice. An article in the still-current SPIEGEL. Title: “How much alcohol is really healthy?” Author Guido Kleinhubbert dares to do what hardly any major medium has attempted in the past three years: He breaks out of the WHO rhetoric’s sphere of influence. Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) There are small turning points in the war waged by established ascetics in over-correct media against wine. One of them has just arrived, as so often, quietly — but in the very newspaper that over the past two years has distinguished itself as a mouthpiece for the morally charged demand for asceticism: the Süddeutsche Zeitung. There, where otherwise the missionary diligence of a traffic policeman is used to Read the full article…
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